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Presented here without scale or legend, are the Nice Ride flows from 2012. As with the mapping I did for 2011, individual road segments are thickened to represent the volume of Nice Ride traffic that traveled over them during the year. Bike trails and lanes were favored by the routing software, but since it looked for direct routes, some paths may be under or over represented compared with real-life Nice Rider travel (Cedar Lake Trail versus Hennepin Avenue, for example).

St. Paul is much more vibrant in 2012, with the Lake Street bridge seeing a high volume of Nice Riders crossing to our twin city. Top traffic segments included the Hennepin-Lyndale Bottleneck south of Loring Park, south of the Stone Arch Bridge, West River Parkway, and the Hiawatha trail east of the Metrodome.

Nice Ride has released all the numbers for their 2012 season, and things are looking good.

Total number of stations increased 24%

Total rentals increased 26%

Total duration of rentals increased 36%

Rentals by Nice Ride subscribers increased 14%

Rentals by casual users (non-subscribers) increased 50%

The 2012 season peaked in June with 52,000 rentals, while the 2011 season peaked later, in July with about 49,000 rentals.

Distribution of usage among stations looks similar to 2011, with the notable exception that many more St. Paul stations were online in 2012. Heaviest stations usage is still in the diagonal Hennepin Ave corridor between SE 4th Street and Lake Street in Uptown.

Notable changes in the data include the fact that Nice Ride is no longer including the gender of each rental rider, which means we’ll have a harder time determining if we’re addressing the gender gap. They are also not giving us a list of subscribers like they did in 2011, so we can’t analyze that.

Nice Ride has released their data on rentals from 2011. After seeing these maps of “route fluxes” from bike sharing systems around the world by Oliver O’Brien at the Suprageography blog, I just had to figure out how to make them myself.

I didn’t use Routino as Oliver did, but instead figured out a way to make ArcGIS Network Analyst do what I wanted (after a fair amount of data wrangling and lots of loading time). I’ll probably post more on that later.

Trip counts on each segment vary between 4 and 29,000. I restricted bike routes to roads with a speed limit under 40 mph. One drawback is that my road network did not include off-street trails (greenway, etc).